This week’s Top Five on NC Policy Watch

Here are three simple truths about yesterday’s on again, off again circus at the state Legislative Building at which state lawmakers wasted thousands of taxpayer dollars and person hours and further damaged the state’s reputation in an unsuccessful special session that was supposed to have repealed North Carolina’s all-purpose LGBT discrimination law, HB2:

#1 – The notion pushed by Senate leader Phil Berger and others that Democrats and Gov.-elect Roy Cooper were somehow responsible for the failure is utterly preposterous. [Read more[1]…]

Since yesterday’s failure to pass a repeal of HB2 in a hastily arranged extra session of the North Carolina General Assembly, we’ve gotten a number of questions from readers via e-mail, Facebook and Twitter.

Wherever you stand on the underlying issues, it’s be easy to get confused about some of what’s happened in the last week. It’s complicated, it happened quickly and a number of politically-motivated narratives about what happened and why have emerged.

Here are answers – as best we can manage – for a few of the most-asked questions we’ve seen.[Read more[2]…]

In true North Carolina General Assembly fashion, all the fireworks of the fifth special legislative session of the year went off in the 11th hour – or rather, the ninth hour for those keeping track of the day.

Legislators were called to Raleigh to repeal House Bill 2 after Charlotte repealed its anti-discrimination ordinance. They left without repealing anything.

There were two bills filed Wednesday in the Senate — one introduced by Democrats to repeal HB2 in full and the other introduced by Republicans to repeal HB2 with a six-month “cooling-off period” that would prevent local governments from enacting ordinances “regulating employment practices or regulating public accommodations or access to restrooms, showers, or changing facilities.” [Read more[4]…]

Gov. elect Roy Cooper addressed media Wednesday night after legislators failed at a special session to repeal House Bill 2.

“Today, the legislature had a chance to do the right thing for North Carolina and they failed,” he said.

Charlotte repealed an anti-discrimination ordinance on the promise that the legislature would repeal the sweeping anti-LGBTQ bill. Cooper said at the press conference that brokering the deal was a lot of work, and he knew there were enough Republican and Democrat votes to fully repeal the law. [Read more[5]…]

Calling House Bill 17 an attempt to “diminish the board’s constitutional authority,” State Board of Education Chairman Bill Cobey and the members of the state’s governing public school panel retired to close session to discuss their response with attorneys Tuesday morning.

Board members indicated they would not be returning to open session to discuss the matter Tuesday , which means that the panel isn’t likely to approve any lawsuits against the legislature today. Such an action would have to be conducted in open session under open records laws.

[5] Roy Cooper: Legislature failed North Carolina by not repealing HB2 in full : http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2016/12/21/roy-cooper-legislature-failed-north-carolina-not-repealing-hb2-full/#sthash.fsbWrEhG.dpbs

[7] State Board of Education talks possible lawsuit over legislative limits to their power : http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2016/12/20/state-board-education-talks-possible-lawsuit-legislative-limits-power/#sthash.JgLAp9ES.dpbs